The Millions Interview

“If you fall in love with your subject, you can so identify with your subject that you lose something of your own self to it. The first two biographers of Malcolm Lowry who was a suicide, they both killed themselves. Maybe they had that inclination to begin with. But that can happen.”

I had worked as a taxi driver, a stockbroker. A fishing trawler. I had many kinds of jobs. And I know this is the greatest job that you can have. To actually get up in the morning and people are paying you to do what you really want to do. To come up with these stories.

While evil is obviously universal, various forms of evil portrayed in The Uninnocent do seem to me to be distinctly American. An unstable idealism that sometimes erupts into irrevocable acts of violence or crime does reside in the hearts of many of these characters.

“I wanted to honor the memory of this gay man who was silenced in so many different ways — by his chronic stutter, by his outré sexuality, by the labor camp, and finally by his brother, Vladimir Nabokov, who failed to mention Sergey’s existence until the third version of Speak, Memory.”

“You have to sink in order to write a book. I don’t mean in a depressive sort of way. You have to diffuse as much as anything else. Just in those early days — to lose control of it and to be helpless and not know what you are doing. And then the focus comes sentence by sentence.”

“All along I said I wanted a community-focused bookstore, and that has really come to fruition so much sooner than I’d expected. I think the bonds with the community are going to just get stronger the longer we’re here.”

“For a filmmaker to have made 17 movies in 35 years is pretty good. And most of them — we don’t always have enough money to do them justice, but most of them, there was no fighting a rear guard action against a studio to change things or tell you who to cast or whatever, so I have been really lucky.”